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Hello my little Valentine cupcake from Frosted Delights (because it has to come from the good bakery),

This book has been brewing inside me since I wrote Brian and Mina’s Holiday Hits .

When Aidan unexpectedly showed up as an almost-six-year-old in Blowing Things Up , the second novella in the series, I had no idea he was going to not only play such a big supporting role in that whole novella series and in Brian’s character development, but that he would get his own book and we’d be meeting his leading lady in the final novella of the series, My Violent Valentine .

I want to talk about Maddie first. I think we still live in a society in which we find any woman with any strength at all “unlikable”. We want strong heroines but the moment they appear, we’re mad at them. Especially when they don’t immediately give into the hero.

When we read romance, we wear the heroine like a costume, but only for the parts we like and want. We don’t let her trauma be real enough to understand why she wouldn’t leap into the arms of the hero, especially in dark romance for some reason.

I love Maddie so much. I love her attitudes about life, her strength, and her resistance. Because while we love Adian and we empathize with his trauma, Maddie also has trauma. And ALL her trauma is caused by Aidan, as hard as that is to hear.

She wasn’t a “mean girl”, she was SIX years old and his stalking never let up!

The way he stalked her from age six to thirteen (longer, but she didn’t know that)…

the way she had nightmares from trying to escape this kid who was growing more and more anti-social and dangerous every year.

The way he destroyed her family’s financial situation and put her into instability just so he could take advantage of the situation.

Aidan is not a good guy, even though we like him. I think my greatest gift and greatest curse is to make the worst men so likeable and then somehow the heroine’s reasonable responses to that are “unlikeable”.

I don’t know the solution to that. I just wish we could be more understanding of what a heroine has been through.

But even though I know it will upset some readers that this is a slow burn and Maddie doesn’t just immediately roll over for him, I will never sell out my voice and my art and my story to give someone instant satisfaction.

Maddie as a character has every right to hate the man who forced her to marry him and took all her choices away, the man who put her into financial insecurity intentionally, the man who as a boy terrorized her by his endless presence and refusal to hear her clearly worded “No.”

She’s seen the underbelly of what happens when a man has too much wealth and power and ruthlessness and how women who are envied because they got “that man” are quietly suffering abuse.

And part of why she knows this is that even though she’s in denial about it until the very end, her own mother is dealing with that kind of abuse that hides so easily behind the money and nice things and polite society.

So it’s very reasonable for Maddie to want to escape and to not immediately fling herself at Aidan and trust him. Who care’s if he’s hot and rich and gives her things? He has to earn her after all the harm that was done.

And honestly if she had rolled over faster for him, some readers would think she was too easy and too weak. The only rule of patriarchy is… women lose. Even in fiction.

WE know Aidan is lovable and won’t hurt her, but SHE does not. I knew when I chose not to make her more biddable and agreeable that it might harm this book’s ability to go viral.

It has all the tropes, all the things that should make it soar… but too many women finding Maddie “hard to like” despite all her responses being normal, rational, and exactly what a woman with high self esteem, boundaries, and self-preservation would do… well, it is what it is.

Every single book I write I hope “that’s the one” that will break out, but if I have to sell my soul and my voice then it’s not worth it. I’m sorry, I just can’t give you the “perfect heroine” according to the double standards of a society that never lets a woman’s feelings be valid.

Onto Aidan…

I find Aidan so morally gray but so easy to love.

It took Maddie longer to get there for obvious reasons, but as the author I already felt so attached to his outcome knowing him from the time he was just a cute boy, and seeing all the traumas he was dealing with remarkably well for such a little guy.

It seemed remarkable at the time until he basically turned into a serial killer. (I also find it so wild that Aidan doesn’t realize until the final person on his list is gone that he’s a straight-up serial killer and that this urge isn’t going to go away.)

My favorite scene from this book is the deflowering scene.

It’s so wrong but also so right at the same time.

It’s very primal and intense. It’s when his self control finally reaches its end.

I like the mix of blood from a death combined with blood that’s associated with life.

Even though it’s not “menstrual blood”, symbolically it’s all associated.

And yes, I fully understand hymens or lack of them are irrelevant to virginity.

It’s possible to have had sex and still have an intact hymen, and many virgins lose their hymens without sex or penetration.

The concept of virginity is pretty ugh to begin with, but here we are because…

well it just creates this big contrast in the two main characters.

Anyway, I was very surprised by a few elements that showed up in the book like his Jane Austen book collection.

If you’ve read Brian and Mina’s story, it feels a bit similar to Brian’s fixation with Chopin connected to his own mother, though his backstory is different from Aidan’s.

And… the MEDUSA STATUE. I loved that Aidan had a statue commissioned of Medusa holding his father’s head.

I like to think the face is his mother, but Maddie doesn’t know what Evelyn looked like so she couldn’t comment on that, she was just thrown by how much the severed head looked like Aidan.

This statue is loosely based on a famous contemporary sculpture by Luciano Garbati called Medusa With The Head of Perseus , created in 2008.

It’s a response to the famous classical sculpture Perseus With The Head of Medusa by Benvenuto Cellini which was completed in 1554.

Garbati here is commentating on how utterly fucked up it is that Medusa is cast as the villain when she was the victim of rape.

Perseus isn’t the hero for punishing the victim, and Medusa’s vengeance is sacred.

Also her snake hair is pretty badass. Something I find so fascinating is that modern pagans are elevating Medusa to a goddess who could rub shoulders easily with Lilith, Kali, Skadi, Hecate, and Freyja, which I think is well-deserved.

It doesn’t matter that she’s a Gorgon. Several of the gods in Norse Mythology are part Giant.

The differences in the Medusa statue in Aidan’s garden are the faces and the more savage bloodiness of it all. The sculpture is like a vow from Aidan to his mother of retribution and vengeance for what was done to her.

The title, Ruthless Devotion speaks of Aidan’s general ruthlessness obviously, but his devotion can mean three different things at once…

his devotion to his mother’s memory, his devotion to Maddie, and his devotion to the Church.

I loved the idea of making Aidan truly devout in his Catholicism.

It’s not just for show or a habit, he really believes in the tenets of his religion.

As a child he prayed to “the angel”, Mina, who he had a drawing of (the story of that is in Brian and Mina’s Holiday Hits ), and his belief in these kinds of things hasn’t waned in the intervening years which I think makes him more interesting and complex.

I also love the first wedding dance song. This song is just so unhinged if you listen to the lyrics but it felt so strongly like a message Aidan would want to deliver to Maddie.

And the ending with her father on the list?

I’m not sure if that came as a surprise to anyone, not only that her father was on the list but that Aidan was actually going to kill him.

The drama of that whole moment and situation…

It was so dark but it was exactly what needed to happen for their black moment as a couple.

My hope is that that moment was a surprise and felt like a shock, while at the same time feeling inevitable.

If I told you everything I love about this story and these characters I’d just be rehashing the entire book.

There are so many little details I love about this.

I wanted to create a very overtly “Beauty and the Beast” retelling with my own spin with this one.

I’ve definitely dabbled with this core story before, as all dark romance authors have, but I felt this one was a little more on the nose.

I didn’t realize until I finished just how many fairytales and folklore and romance stories I referenced: Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, The Princess and the Pea, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Jane Austen, and I’m sure there’s more in there that I’m forgetting.

I also really loved being able to bring Brian and Mina into this and was surprised by how substantial Brian’s role was for a side character cameo.

Love,

Kitty